A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2) by Charles Creighton

of young sea-surgions imployed in the East India companies affairs,” and dedicated it to Sir Thomas Smith, himself a navigator, and then chairman of the Court of Directors. This practical manual is largely occupied with the management of fractures, dislocations, amputations, and the like, a part of his subject wherein Woodall was thoroughly competent; but there appears also in the title, “the cure of the scurvie, the fluxes of the belly, of the collica and iliaca passio, tenasmus and exitus ani, the callenture.” The section on scurvy, twenty-six pages long, is the one that here concerns us. This was what Sir Richard Hawkins had desired: “And I wish that some learned men would write of it, for it is the plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners.” Woodall begins by disclaiming learning: “A learned treatise befits not my pen.” But, at all events, his was the voice of the faculty, and he plunges boldly into pathology in the very first lines: “Scurvy is a disease of the spleen, whereby it is sometimes wholly stopped” etc. Being a man of much good sense, Woodall quickly leaves that line of remark, for a time at least. He repeats all the familiar experience of Hawkins, Lancaster, and the numerous captains of East Indiamen, with whom he must have conversed many times (it does not appear that he had himself sailed). He mentions the great benefit to the crews from landing at the Cape, with the fresh air and food, scurvy being thereby cured “without much other help.” He enforces the need of changes of clothing, and other things in the regimen on board, just as Hawkins and others were wont to do in practice. He is as clear on the virtues of lime-juice as Lancaster, and copies somewhat closely the practice of the latter in 1601: “each morning two or three spoonfuls, and fast after it two hours”; his originality appearing in the rider, grateful to seamen: “and if you add one spoonful of aqua vitae thereto, to a cold stomach it is the better.” He mentions that a “good quantity of juice of lemons is sent in each ship out of England, by the great care of the merchants, and intended only for the relief of every poor man in his need.” The ship’s surgeon is advised to lay in a store of fresh lemons and oranges where they were to be had on the voyage, and of tamarinds at Bantam. So far, Woodall merely sets down what every shipmaster knew as to the things that bring on scurvy, the best regimen to keep it off, and the extraordinarily rapid curative effect of lime-juice and of change to land air and fresh food. But there was a certain professional doctrine of scurvy, and a treatment of it _secundum artem_, namely the wisdom of learned men which Hawkins had called for; and we have now to see what that was, according to Woodall. His pathology is that of “obstructions,” a curious fancy of the learned[1149]. The spleen, said Woodall in his opening lines, is the chief seat of obstruction; but on resuming the pathology, he proceeds to obstructions also of the liver and brain: “But it is plain that this grief is a lazy foul disease with obstructions of the liver, or spleen, or both; as also it appeareth that the head is much diseased, and that there is great obstructions in the brain, for that the eyes not only look evil coloured, but also the gums putrefy, and the teeth grow loose, and all the sinewy parts of the body bear their part in the disease, for the shrinking and withering of the sinews, with the great pains the party hath, declareth no less” (p. 180). This theoretical pathology Woodall supports by an appeal to morbid anatomy: “Also it is manifest that divers of those which have been opened after death have had their livers utterly rotted”-others having their livers much swollen, and the spleen swollen, others full of water, others their lungs putrefied and stunk while they have lived, (which last may have been an incorrect inference from the foul state of the mouth). Such being the pathology of the disease, he comes next to the indications of cure; and these he takes from “a famous writer, Johannes Echthius.” They are: